Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution, Lehman, Proc. IEEE, 1980
Today’s paper came highly recommended by Kevlin Henney and Nat Pryce in a Twitter thread last week, thank you both!
The footnotes show that the manuscript for this paper was submitted almost exactly 40 years ago – on the 27th February 1980. The problems it describes though (and that the community had already been wrestling with for a couple of decades) seem as fresh and relevant as ever. Is there some kind of Lindy effect for problems as there is for published works? I.e., should we expect to still be grappling with these issues for at least another 60 years? In this particular instance at least, it seems likely.
As computers play an ever larger role in society and the life of the individual, it becomes more and more critical to be able to create and maintain effective, cost-effective, and timely software. For more than two decades, however, the programming fraternity, and through them the computer-user community, has faced serious problems achieving this.
On programming, projects, and products
What does a programmer do? A programmer’s task, according to Lehman, is to "state an algorithm Continue reading
